Overview

The dissertation, A Machine for Living In stages intelligent systems in domestic space to study the home as a site of intimate life. Designed to be inhabited, this project examines how technologies are altered through inhabitation. Upending the typical utilitarian concerns of the smart home with optimization and efficiency, I focus instead on the home as a nexus of personal history, desires, relationships, episodic narrative, and bodily praxis. I deploy technologies that purport to represent and analyze the self--speech recognition and synthesis, motion capture, and facial recognition, for example--and engage them with the messy conditions of domestic life. Living within the machine for a number of weeks, I produce a durable record of the home and its inhabitants: human, animal, machine. This material is restaged for viewers as a hybrid experience of recorded media and live interaction.